Docear is written in Java, licensed under the GNU General Public License and based on the open source software Freeplane and JabRef. The term ‘Docear’ has two meanings. First, it is pronounced similarly to “dog ear”, the folded down corner of a paper page. Second, “docear” in Latin means “I would be taught”.[4]

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Docear is the successor of SciPlore MindMapping (aka FreeMind Scholar) which was originally developed by Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp as part of their PhD projects in 2009 at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and University of California, Berkeley. In July 2011, Joeran Beel and his colleagues Stefan Langer and Marcel Genzmehr received a grant[5] to re-develop SciPlore MindMapping, since then being called Docear. While SciPlore MindMapping was based on FreeMind, Docear is built upon the mind mapping software Freeplane and the reference manager JabRef. The first version of SciPlore MindMapping was released in May 2009. The first private Alpha of Docear was released in December 2011, the first public Beta in February 2012 which was later presented on CeBIT.[6]

Docear has two key features not always offered by comparable tools.[7] First, Docear lets you import PDF annotations (bookmarks, comments and highlighted text). This way, a document’s most important information can be easily organized. If more information is required than the bookmark or comment itself provides, Docear can open the PDF on the page the bookmarks points to. Second, all information is structured in a mind map. Information management in a mind map is more effective and efficient than using a simple list or social tags.[8]

I am one of the founders of Docear, which is a new software for organizing, creating, and discovering academic literature. Today, we released version 1.0 of Docear after a ~2 year beta phase. If you are interested in reference management, you might ...